Dear Hormone Solutions reader,

Since the early 1940’s when hormones were first commercially synthesised, heralding the birth of today’s pharmaceutical industry, both sexes have been exposed to the life-changing positives and negatives of hormone supplementation.

Healthcare is big business with a multitude of competing interests – government, hospitals, Big Pharma, small pharma, conservative mainstream medicine, holistic and antiaging mainstream medicine, alternative health practitioners, the compounding pharmacy industry, traditional retail pharmacy and somewhere in amongst it all this is the patient. I am in the unique and privileged position to have a foot in all camps.

For the first sixteen years of my career I dealt at the coal face with patients. Those shared experiences are etched into the fabric of what I have done since. In 1995 I established Lawley Pharmaceuticals – a specialist pharmaceutical company focused solely on the production of pharmaceutical grade bio-identical hormonal products. They are products Big Pharma won’t touch because there is no patent protection available. As a consequence there has been little appetite for industry sponsored scientific research using these basic building blocks of our endocrine system until recently. The keystone reproductive hormones of the human body – estradiol, progesterone and testosterone – are the subject of intense interest from health professionals. Their effects extend way beyond reproduction and are linked to a diverse range of ailments from dry eyes to Alzheimer’s disease to cardiac blood flow.

This blog is for patient learning, for looking past symptoms to the underlying cause of disease, to make sense of new science and for translating what can initially seem complex into language easily understood. Daily I speak and communicate with people seeking advice about hormones and the health conditions they are dealing with. I hope this blog provides some of the answers or at least points people in the right direction.